Over 80% of phishing sites now target mobile devices
M-ishing was highlighted to be the top security challenge plaguing the mobile
space, both in the public sector (10%) and the private sector, and more
importantly, 76% of phishing sites are now using HTTP, giving users a false
sense of communication protocol. “Phishing using HTTPS is not completely new,”
Krishna Vishnubhotla, vice President for product strategy at Zimperium. “Last
year’s report revealed that, between 2021 and 2022, the percentage of phishing
sites targeting mobile devices increased from 75% to 80%. Some of them were
already using HTTPS but the focus was converting campaigns to target mobile.”
“This year, we are seeing a meteoric rise in this tactic for mobile devices,
which is a sign of maturing tactics on mobile, and it makes sense. The mobile
form factor is conducive to deceiving the user because we rarely see the URL in
the browser or the quick redirects. Moreover, we are conditioned to believe a
link is secure if it has a padlock icon next to the URL in our browsers.
Especially on mobile, users should look beyond the lock icon and carefully
verify the website’s domain name before entering any sensitive information,”
Vishnubhotla said.
How GPT-4o defends your identity against AI-generated deepfakes
OpenAI’s latest model, GPT-4o, is designed to identify and stop these growing
threats. As an “autoregressive omni model, which accepts as input any
combination of text, audio, image and video,” as described on its system card
published on Aug. 8. OpenAI writes, “We only allow the model to use certain
pre-selected voices and use an output classifier to detect if the model deviates
from that.” Identifying potential deepfake multimodal content is one of the
benefits of OpenAI’s design decisions that together define GPT-4o. Noteworthy is
the amount of red teaming that’s been done on the model, which is among the most
extensive of recent-generation AI model releases industry-wide. All models need
to constantly be training on and learning from attack data to keep their edge,
and that’s especially the case when it comes to keeping up with attackers’
deepfake tradecraft that is becoming indistinguishable from legitimate content.
... GANs most often consist of two neural networks. The first is a generator
that produces synthetic data (images, videos or audio) and a discriminator that
evaluates its realism. The generator’s goal is to improve the content’s quality
to deceive the discriminator. This advanced technique creates deepfakes nearly
indistinguishable from real content.
The 4 Evolutions of Your Observability Journey
Known unknowns can be used to describe the second stage. They fit because we’re
looking at things we know we don’t know, but we’re trying to see how well we can
develop the understanding of those unknowns, whereas if these were unknown
unknowns, we wouldn’t even know where to start. If the first stage is where most
of your observability tooling lies, then this is the era of service-level
objectives (SLOs); this is also the stage where observability starts being
phrased in a “yes, and” manner. … Having developed the ability to figure out
that you can ask questions about what happened in a system in the past, you’re
probably now primarily concerned with statistical questions and developing more
comprehensive correlations. ... Additionally, one of the most interesting
developments here is when your incident reports change: They stop becoming
concerned about what happened and start becoming concerned with how unusual or
surprising it was. You’re seeing first hand this stage of the observability
journey in action if you’ve ever read a retrospective that said something like,
“We were surprised by the behavior, so we dug in. Even though our alerts were
telling us that this other thing was the problem, we investigated the surprising
thing first.”
Be the change you want to see: How to show initiative in the workplace
At one point or another, all of us are probably guilty of posing a question
without offering a solution. Often we may feel that others are more qualified to
address an issue than we are and as long as we bring the matter to someone’s
attention, then that’s as far as we need go. While this is well and good – and
certainly not every scenario can be dealt with single-handedly – it can be good
practice to brainstorm ideas for the problems you identify. It’s important to
loop people in and utilise the expertise of others, but you should also have
confidence in your ability to tackle an issue. Identifying the problem is half
the battle, so why not keep going and see what you come up with? ... Some are
born with confidence to spare and some are not, luckily it is a skill that can
be learned over time. Working on improving your confidence level, being more
vocal and presenting yourself as an expert in your field are crucial to
improving your ability to show initiative, as it means you are far more likely
to take the reins and lead the way. Taking the initiative or going out on a
limb, in many scenarios, can be nerve-wracking and you may doubt that you are
the best person for the job.
What is RPA? A revolution in business process automation
RPA is often touted as a mechanism to bolster ROI or reduce costs, but it can
also be used to improve customer experience. For example, enterprises such as
airlines employ thousands of customer service agents, yet customers are still
waiting in queues to have their calls fielded. A chatbot could help alleviate
some of that wait. ... COOs were some of the earliest adopters of RPA. In many
cases, they bought RPA and hit a wall during implementation, prompting them to
ask for IT’s help (and forgiveness). Now citizen developers without technical
expertise are using cloud software to implement RPA in their business units, and
often the CIO has to step in and block them. Business leaders must involve IT
from the outset to ensure they get the resources they require. ... Many
implementations fail because design and change are poorly managed, says Sanjay
Srivastava, chief digital officer of Genpact. In the rush to get something
deployed, some companies overlook communication exchanges between the various
bots, which can break a business process. “Before you implement, you must think
about the operating model design,” Srivastava says. “You need to map out how you
expect the various bots to work together.”
Best practices for implementing threat exposure management, reducing cyber risk exposure
Threat exposure management is the evolution of traditional vulnerability
management. Several trends are making it a priority for modern security teams.
An increase in findings that overwhelm resource-constrained teams As the attack
surface expands to cloud and applications, the volume of findings is compounded
by more fragmentation. Cloud, on-prem, and AppSec vulnerabilities come from
different tools. Identity misconfigurations from other tools. This leads to
enormous manual work to centralize, deduplicate, and prioritize findings using a
common risk methodology. Finally, all of this is happening while attackers are
moving faster than ever, with recent reports showing the median time to exploit
a vulnerability is less than one day! Threat exposure management is essential
because it continuously identifies and prioritizes risks—such as vulnerabilities
and misconfigurations—across all assets, using the risk context applicable to
your organization. By integrating with existing security tools, TEM offers a
comprehensive view of potential threats, empowering teams to take proactive,
automated actions to mitigate risks before they can be exploited.
Understanding VBS Enclaves, Windows’ new security technology
Microsoft recently extended its virtualization-based security model to what it
calls VBS Enclaves. If you’ve looked at implementing confidential computing on
Windows Server or in Azure, you’ll be familiar with the concept of enclaves,
using Intel’s SGX instruction set to lock down areas of memory, using them as
a trusted execution environment. ... So how do you build and use VBS Enclaves?
First, you’ll need Windows 11 or Windows Server 2019 or later, with VBS
enabled. You can do this from the Windows security tool, via a Group Policy,
or with Intune to control it via MDM. It’s part of the Memory Integrity
service, so you should really be enabling it on all supported devices to help
reduce security risks, even if you don’t plan to use VBS Enclaves in your
code. The best way to think of it is as a way of using encrypted storage
securely. So, for example, if you’re using a database to store sensitive data,
you can use code running in an enclave to process and query that data, passing
results to the rest of your application. You’re encapsulating data in a secure
environment with only essential access allowed. No other parts of your system
have access to the decryption keys, so on-disk data stays secure.
Smart(er) Subsea Cables to Provide Early Warning System
With the U.N. estimating between 150 to 200 cable faults annually, operators
need all the help they can get to maintain the global fiber network, which
carries about 99% of internet traffic between continents. Additionally, $10
trillion of financial transactions flow over them per day. This growing
situation has businesses desperately seeking network resiliency and clamoring
for always-on-network services as their data centers and apps demand maximum
uptime. The system has been beset this year with large cable outages starting
in February in the Red Sea and in the spring along Western Africa, and more.
... Equipping the cable with sensors would enhance research into one of the
most under-explored regions of the planet: the vast depths of the Southern
Ocean, the study read. The Southern Ocean that surrounds Antarctica strongly
influences other oceans and climates worldwide, according to the NSF.
“Equipping the subsea telecommunications cable with sensors would help
researchers better understand how deep-sea currents contribute to global
climate change and improve understanding of earthquake seismology and related
early warning signs for tsunamis in the earthquake-prone South Pacific
region.”
Security Needs to Be Simple and Secure By Default: Google
"Google engineers are working to secure AI and to bring AI to security
practitioners," said Steph Hay, senior director of Gemini + UX for cloud
security at Google. "Gen AI represents the inflection point of security. It is
going to transform security workflows and give the defender the advantage."
... Google also advocates for the convergence of security products and
embedding AI into the entire security ecosystem. Through Mandiant, VirusTotal
and the Google Cloud Platform, Google aims to drive this convergence, along
with safe browsing. Google is making this convergence possible by taking a
platform-centric approach through its Security Command Center, or SCC.
Hemrajani shared that SCC aims to unify security categories such as cloud
security posture management, Kubernetes security posture management,
entitlement management and threat intelligence. Security information and event
management and security orchestration, automation and response also need to
converge. "SCC is bringing all of these together to be able to model the risk
that you are exposed to in a holistic manner," he said. "We also realize that
there is a power of convergence between cloud risk management and security
operations. We need to converge them even further and bring them together to
truly benefit."
The AI Revolution: How Machine Learning Changed the World in Two Years
The future of AI in business will involve continued collaboration between
governments, businesses, and individuals to address challenges and maximize
opportunities presented by this transformative technology. AI is likely to
become increasingly integrated into software and hardware, making it easier
for businesses to adopt and utilize its capabilities. Success will depend on
how it is leveraged to augment human capabilities rather than replacing them,
creating a future where humans and AI work together in a complementary way.
Beyond automating individual tasks, AI is driving a paradigm shift towards
unprecedented efficiency across entire business operations. By automating
repetitive tasks, AI allows employees to focus on more strategic and creative
work, leading to increased productivity and innovation. A recent McKinsey
study found AI could potentially automate 45% of the activities currently
performed by workers. As well as automating processes, it can also streamline
operations, and minimize errors, leading to significant cost savings for
businesses. For example, automating customer service with AI can reduce the
need for human agents, leading to lower labor costs.
Quote for the day:
"Intelligence is the ability to change
your mind when presented with accurate information that contradicts your
beliefs" -- Vala Afshar
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